Spinner.

Thomas Wijck (also Thomas Wijk, or Thomas Wyck; 1616–1677) was a Dutch painter of port views and genre paintings who also made a small number of etchings. Wijck was born into an artist family and received his training from his father. He journeyed to Italy, presumably by 1640, the year in which a ‘Tommaso fiammingo, pittore’ (Thomas the Fleming, painter) is documented as residing in Rome in the Via della Fontanella. Although this evidence of his residence in Rome around this time has been questioned, a number of his pictures depict scenes in and around Rome which would indicate a visit to the city at some point. He also resided in the environs of Naples, where he executed many sketches which he subsequently worked up into drawings of coast views.

In 1642 Wijck returned to the northern Netherlands, where he became a member of the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke.  In 1660 he was appointed Dean of the Haarlem Guild. He went to England about the time of the Restoration and was much employed, painting a View of London before the fire, and another of the north bank of the Thames from Southwark, exhibiting the mansions of the nobility in the Strand. He also painted the Fire of London more than once. He was followed there by his son and pupil Jan Wyck, who remained in Britain for the rest of his career and played an important role in the development of English sporting painting. Thomas Wijck was also the teacher of the Haarlem painter Jan van der Vaardt who later also emigrated to England. He died in Haarlem in August 1677. 

Wijck excelled in Italianate paintings of shipping and seaports, populated with many figures, very frequently odd characters such as alchemists and misers. His style resembles that of the loose group of Dutch and Flemish genre painters working in Rome, the so-called Bamboccianti and were influenced by the genre paintings of Pieter van Laar. This aspect of his oeuvre is most evident in the three Wijck etchings currently in Te Papa's collection. Our print depicts a woman spinning wool on the left, and a man with a tall hat sitting just behind her; both are unsentimentally though not unsympathetically observed. The backcloth is an shabby looking, probably Dutch town backstreet, intensely wrought in Wijck's strokes of the etcher's needle. 

See: Wikipedia, 'Thomas Wijck', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Wijck

Dr Mark Stocker  Curator, Historical International Art     March 2019